Morning Joe: Media Too Busy Cheerleading For Clinton To See The Trump Phenomenon

The news media was so busy with its self-assumed role of being Hillary Clinton’s cheerleader that it missed what was going on all across America, MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said Thursday.

“The Clinton campaign believed until 9 o’clock that they had a lock on this, that they were going to win. That fault of that, actually, lies with the media,” he said.

“… they stopped being journalists for the past month, and began being cheerleaders, and began being people who had a conclusion that they reached, and then searched for facts to show that Hillary was a 92, 93, 99.999 percent chance winner of winning this campaign,” he added.

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Scarborough said that the media, led by the New York Times and Washington Post, became obsessed with fulfilling its prophecies that President-elect Donald Trump could not win, and failed to do its job.

“It was there the entire time,” he said of Trump’s march to victory in the election. “They didn’t want to hear it, they didn’t want to see it.”

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Scarborough then gave the media a scolding.

“I want you guys to think about this, at the Times and the Washington Post, people I know and love. I want you to think about this,” Scarborough said.

“When anybody even made the suggestion that Donald Trump could be elected president of the United States, it was their journalistic standards that were questioned,” he said.

“You had a complete blind spot, and you wanted to keep it that way. It was much easier for you to stay in Manhattan and say that they are all racists and bigots.”

He added that if the editors of the Times still believe that 50 million Americans are “racists and bigots … I take pity on you.”

Scarborough noted that the Trump campaign marked an unconventional time in American politics.

“You don’t understand what’s going on. Let’s face it: I didn’t understand what’s going on out there. But you know what (co-host Mark Halperin) and I did that you didn’t do? You know what (co-host Mika Brzezinski) did that you didn’t do? We actually talked to people in Middle America. And they told us they were hurting, and they told us why they were voting for Trump,” he said.

Instead, he said, the Times had only one mission.

“Think about what you did. You were trying to help Hillary Clinton defeat Donald Trump,” Scarborough said.

“You completely ignored the world,” he added.

Scarborough later held up the front page of Thursday morning’s Times with a lead headline that read, “Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency.”

“This is staggering, it really is. This is the day after a surprising underdog sweeping victory and their headline is not ‘Disaffected Americans Have a Champion Going to the White House’ or ‘The Country Votes for Fundamental Change,'” Halperin chimed in.

“The headline is about how disappointed the friends of the people who run The New York Times are. This shows that the editors of The New York Times—I have the greatest respect for them—don’t get it,” he said. “This is a Saturday Night Live sketch. You went to a cocktail party the night before and you decided to write this.”